


Heaven and Hell

by ArwenKenobi



Series: The Refining Fire 'verse [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-31
Updated: 2010-08-31
Packaged: 2017-10-14 08:35:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/147385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArwenKenobi/pseuds/ArwenKenobi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock Holmes's perspective of the events of <span class="u">Hide and Seek</span>. Needless to say you're going to have to read that first in order for this to make any sense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heaven and Hell

Sherlock does not even stay for the entire meeting. He glances at the photographs, of the reports, even somehow manages to sit through the vast majority of the video of John Watson being tortured and killed by Sebastian Moran’s henchmen,( on orders from Jim Moriarty of course) but doesn’t stay for the nonsense that soon to follow it.

“That’s not him,” he tells them and leaves. As soon as he’s out of sight he punches in John’s number. It doesn’t even ring. His mind tells him that he had seen the shattered pieces of John’s Mycroft-issued mobile himself but he shoves that thought away. Not the right one, it has to be fake, it just so happens to have a perfect replica. There are even the singe marks from the most recent attempt Moriarty had made at having them blown up.

 _Remind me to strap that bugger to some C4 when I get my hands on him. I’ve had it with this cat and mouse nonsense._

That had been nearly a year ago and they were still in it. They. Plural. He holds onto that thought as he retreats back to yet another hole in the wall room in yet another city (his mind supplies that he’s currently in Kiev but that stops).

HHe had last seen John Watson in Greece. That had been three months ago. Not a word from him since. Extremely uncharacteristic. Sherlock had texted but he’d received no replies.

It was all wrong. All of it was wrong. He keeps texting John. Eventually he gives up texting and keeps calling. The line never engages, not even a voice telling him that the number had been disconnected, it just _doesn’t ring._

The part of him that sounds like John Watson tells him to stop it or he’ll burn out the battery, and this flat doesn’t have the right outlet for the charger. He lays off but watches the phone like a hawk.

Mycroft finds him the next day, of course, and lays it into him. He brings the photographs and meticulously takes him through the evidence as if he were a child. He allows it. He can’t trust his brain, it’s clouded by that heart that he had become convinced he hadn’t had.

Somewhere he hears Moriarty laughing and the part that sounds like John Watson sighs irritably and informs him that he’s always hated that laugh.

 _I don’t think he actually knows how to laugh,_ John had told him one night in Paris. _Everything he does is an act and this seems to be his worst one. There are fake laughs and there are fake laughs. This is the latter._

“Sherlock?”

He leaves Mycroft and takes the evidence with him. He takes a flight back to London, to track down the scene of the crime and find out what really happened from there. The site, an abandoned warehouse in the far East End, is mostly cinders by the time he gets there. The dogs that Moran set on John are gone and there is still blood on the ground.

He tests it. John’s. Every scrap of blood he tests is John’s.

He watches the video again, this time trying to block out John’s screams, and concentrate on the man. He watches the face, listens to the intonation of the words if not the words themselves, he looks for anything. A sign, a mark, anything that will prove that this isn’t right. That this can’t be John Watson.

He doesn’t see it. The part of him that sounds like John Watson informs him that his luck is awful.

He watches the nameless head murderer put his knives down and ring Moran. “Watson’s dead.”

Sherlock wants to lose it. He wants to let loose this torrent of emotions, larger and more frightening than anything he’s ever felt before, and simply let this grief take him wherever it will. It doesn’t matter what happens now. He’s always been so cautious, always denied emotions whenever he saw fit to allow himself to feel them. This one is one he actually wants to embrace and feel and ride for however long it will.

He takes a deep breath, whimpers, and forces it all back down until he feels nothing at all. He feels his hand shake – his left, he notes, but quickly forces it to still – and then feels nothing at all. Nothing but an approaching storm waiting to strike.

He would let it strike. He would let it strike as soon as Moriarty was dead. Until then, he would do could he could to keep it at bay.

======================================

Moriarty’s smile is sickening. More sickening than usual and almost wolf like here. Sherlock wants to shoot him right then and there without any preamble so he does. Two shots to the head and another two to the chest. His aim is military. John had taught him well. Moriarty’s look of surprise brings a ghost of a smile to his face. Then he feels his chest rattle with that scream he has been holding back for four months and he literally clamps his hand over his mouth to force it back down his throat. Not here, not now, he tells himself. Get out and get out fast or you’ll be as good as dead yourself.

Part of him, a part of him he’s never heard before, tells him to let it happen. What was the point now? John is avenged but John is still dead. You know exactly what waits for you now, it taunts him. John let you see, let you understand, that you were lonely before you met him.

For a moment, a single moment, Sherlock hates John for that. If he’d never met him he would never understand the horror, the meaninglessness, of what lay back at 221b Baker Street, London for him.

The part of him that sounds like John Watson informs him that if he lets himself be killed he is going to kick him right back into the land of the living so hard it will bring colour to his face. It also tells that dark menacing voice where to go. Sherlock smiles a little at that and flees the building like a bat out of hell. His mind is blank, for the first time in his life as he runs. No thoughts and only the sound of his feet on the street and his breathing fill the silence that he thought he would never hear in his mind.

When he’s safe he texts Mycroft that Moriarty is dead. Then it all comes crashing back. He feels that monster at the gates of wherever he’s locked it and this time lets it break free. Just a little bit. He falls on all fours in the middle of the room and allows one single gasp of pain to escape him before he sits up on his haunches and grabs his head. He pulls his hair sharply. “No,” he orders. “Not here. Not now.”

His mobile beeps. Mycroft is sending him back to London.

=============================================

The flight from Moscow to London is the most uncomfortable thing he has ever done. He has split in two it seems. Part of him is pleased that the job ended successfully and cannot wait to swap stories with John once John takes out Moran, and he will take out Moran. Then that savage beast of grief in his roars at him that John cannot take down Moran because John is dead and Moran is out playing lord and master wherever he is now. Sherlock can’t find it in himself to care, to go out and finish him too. Moran is a mad dog, one whose ferocity is only dangerous when there’s someone powerful behind it. With Moriarty gone Moran is all on his own somewhere enjoying the freedom. He’ll show his colours somehow sooner or later, and that will be the end of Sebastian Moran. Good riddance for that too.

The part of him that sounds like John tells him to go out and finish things.

He shuts that part up.

The beast within tells him that it’s the least he can do. He’d got John Watson killed after all so he might as well do what this little bit of him, imaginary or not, tells him to do.

It wasn’t my fault, he tells himself. I didn’t kill him. Moriarty did. Moriarty’s men did.

Though really, with Moriarty dead, who else is left to blame?

Himself, naturally Himself and himself alone. Alone. Like he always is going to be now.

He grips the arm rests like they’re John’s shoulders and digs his nails in. He is not going to lose it here. He is not going to let the animal loose here. He will soon, he promises that seven month old pain. He’ll let himself feel it, make himself feel it, as soon as he was back at Baker Street.

Hopefully, and oh how he hoped, it would torture him into madness.

He ignores Mycroft’s texts to come round and lets himself in. Mrs. Hudson is out, apparently visiting her sister for the week, so he barely waits until the flat door is closed before he loses himself in his grief. His mind goes blank in much the way it had when he’d fled Moriarty’s murder scene. He knows he’s yelling, howling even, because when he comes back to himself his throat is raw. He knows that he’d destroyed his room because when his eyes allow him to see past that red haze all he sees his debris, like a storm had torn through the room.

There is a void in him and around him. His mind screams at him that something is not right, SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT, and he howls into the black to shut up and let him acclimatize. People have left him before, he’s always managed to carry on.

This is different, his mind insists. _This is different!_ No one he’s ever really cared about, ever really needed, has left him before. Not like this anyway. No one’s been murdered on his account.

He feels another wave of this madness coming to him again. He tries to force it back. He has had enough. He thought that this one outburst would be the end of it. That it would stop hurting.

The part of him that sounds like John informs him that he’s always going to feel like this now. Sherlock cared about him and now he was going to feel it forever. Bad luck, mate.

This time his mind doesn’t go blank. He knows, rationally, that he’s sitting in the middle of the sitting room – somewhere between the couch and John’s chair – his knees bunched up under his chin while he screams into them, but all his mind provides him with are memories of John. No pattern to them or order. Just snapshots of their life here in London and on the run.

When he comes back to himself again, the beast tired but still there (always will be), he notes that he is crying. Sherlock has not cried in earnest since he was a child. He backs himself away from the room until he’s leaning against the window and rests his forehead on his knees as he lets the tears run their course.

He hates John for this too.

=================================

There are two months, nearly three, that pass after he returns to Baker Street. His mind is somehow keeping track of this time nonsense but the rest of him hasn’t cared. In fact he hasn’t moved from the couch more than a handful of times in those months.

He doesn’t think properly during all of this. It reminds him of the days before he got clean, entire days lost in the haze of his addiction. He doesn’t go back to the drugs but he does take up smoking again and perhaps it is that haze that he’s lost in more than in grief. Or he’s waiting for it to take him away to lord knows where. He doesn’t care anymore. He just doesn’t.

Mrs. Hudson, bless her, tries hard. Occasionally he acknowledges her efforts and will eat what she leaves for him (not your housekeeper, love. Your keeper now it seems.) Sherlock knows she’s considered renting John’s room out but she never does. Nor does she go up there. Not that she ever did before but now it’s forbidden territory.

Lestrade comes by, first with condolences (which Sherlock ignores) and then with cases (which Sherlock also ignores). He remains stubbornly on his couch and ignores text after text from Mycroft and Lestrade trying to get him out into the world again.

Sherlock doesn’t have an audience (or a partner) anymore so he sees no point he going out there. No matter how many criminals he stops he will never be able to chase away the memory of the one crime that had slipped by him. The one that had really mattered.

At some point Sarah manages to get a hold of him – she’s wearing an engagement ring and Sherlock notes disdainfully how fast she’s moved on (though, really, John and Sarah had never reached serious relationship territory so he really has no basis for that sort of attack but he doesn’t care). She ignores it and tells him how sorry she is and if there’s anything she can do.

Sherlock tells her to get married and forget all about him. Then he throws her out. It’s something that he’s constantly telling people to do, to forget about him. No one listens to him. Not like anyone ever did. Even John wouldn’t have listened to him.

At some point in this fog he hears Mrs. Hudson gasp in horror. It’s some reflex that snaps him from the couch to his feet, cigarette dangling precariously out of his mouth. “What is it?” he asks.

Mrs. Hudson shakes her head and beckons him over to the table. He doesn’t know why he follows her but he does and he nearly gasps as well. Instead he gapes and he feels his hands start to shake. In this box lies John Watson’s coat. A coat that Sherlock had last seen torn, bloodied, and tattered. John had died in this coat. Had been murdered in this coat.

The coat looks as well worn as Sherlock remembered it. It looked like it belong hanging on their coat rack instead of here in this box.

“Sherlock?” Mrs. Hudson whispers.

He asks her to leave, that he’ll sort it no matter what it is. This is a joke. This is a sick joke. It has to be.

It can’t be anything else.

======================================

It isn’t a joke. It’s John’s coat. Two days of investigating it proves that it can’t be anything other than what it appears to be. The coat is worn in all the right places, all the places that Sherlock remembers anyway, and the pockets even contain things that he knew John always kept there. There’s a notebook, a notebook that Sherlock had also seen covered in blood months earlier but that’s a side issue. In the inside pocket Sherlock even finds a quick note, in John’s hand, informing him that he has to meet Sherlock Holmes at 221b Baker Street to check out the flat. It’s not sentimentality, Sherlock knows, but it’s something that John had doubtlessly forgotten was in there. A minor detail that proved everything

He had dragged the coat to Scotland Yard a few hours after Mrs. Hudson had nearly had her heart attack and had had it tested for fingerprints.

“All John’s,” Lestrade had told him. “A few others. Yours mostly out of that lot. No known offenders and we have the fingerprints of his killers.”

He wants to know how on earth Scotland Yard had managed that and Lestrade reminds him that they’d washed up four months ago. Matched the people in the video and matched the fingerprints on the other jacket they’d thought was John Watson’s.

“Are you sure this is his?”

Sherlock had been sure then and he was still sure now. This was custom made, patched once in Afghanistan and once in London, and when Sherlock put it on it fit didn’t fit in all the same places (to short in length and too roomy in the shoulders). He tries to tell himself that this is a joke, that this is someone (maybe Moran?) having a go at him. But his mind tells him that his eyes are not lying, nor are his emotions getting the better of him. Not this time.

No evidence of foul play. No new rips or snags to suggest anything other than continued use. It was as if John had posted it to him himself.

He dismisses that idea. It’s a woman’s writing on the box, a box with three different sets of finger on it that are not John’s.

Perhaps, he thinks, John is alive somewhere and this unidentified woman (aside from the obvious that she is unmarried and works in hospitality) is trying to let him know. A flag of sorts...

He stops that thought before it can go any further. This doesn`t change anything, he inwardly roars. John is still dead. They had a reason to keep the coat safe for some reason, that`s all. Or perhaps John had abandoned it somewhere and someone had only kindly mailed it to the address in the note as a gesture of goodwill.

Too many options and none of them quite right, he is frustrated for the first time in nearly a year but barely notices. He takes photographs of the jacket and posts them to his website with the caption “Is this yours? Inquire at 221b Baker Street.”

That’s the best he can do for now. He puts the coat back in the box and puts in the kitchen where he can’t see it.

===================================

Sherlock has started to check his email again only because of the comment notifications, none of which are useful and tell him things that he already knows. The only curious thing is that he gets an e-mail from jacketsender@yahoo.co.uk with an attachment and a subject heading reading “Re: John Watson.”

Before he even opens the attachment he traces the origin of the e-mail to an internet cafe on the other side and is over there in what feels like an instant. He gives the proprietor Moran’s description along with John’s (he doesn’t quite fathom why) and gets a negative response for both (of course). He snidely advises the man to wear his glasses like he’s supposed to and leaves.

He turns on his laptop and opens the attachment. They’re stills, enlarged ones, from the video of John’s murder and he has to look away from the screen for a few moments. He feels that beast, that sleeping storm wakens in him and he somehow manages to silence it. “Shut up,” he whispers harshly. “You’ve seen these before.” The words are as empty as the flat and he finally looks up, his attention drawn to a circle drawn above John’s left shoulder.

He knows what should be there. He’s so used to it that he almost doesn’t notice its absence. When he does his mouth gapes open again for the second time this week. He doesn’t need to read the caption – _no bullet scar on left shoulders = not John Watson_ – to understand the horrible mistake he’s made.

There is a bullet would there, of sorts, but it’s not a war wound. It’s a simple gunshot from a semi automatic that this person, who is not John, probably got as a warning for disobedience. Not John’s scar.

“This is all your fault,” he snarls at the grief – which abruptly leaves him and is replaced with joy beyond anything he’s ever felt because this means that John is _ALIVE_. John is alive and is heaven knows where but he’s alive! He’s so affected that he actually leaps from his chair and gives a cheer. He even cheerfully texts Lestrade – _JOHN IS ALIVE!_ (no response. Probably doing whatever idiocy is on schedule for the day) before his happiness crashes down to suspicion.

What is this? He wonders. If John is alive somewhere why has he not let him know? John has never been the type to deceive well so how could he go about with this sham for so long without cracking, without sending along a message before now. How has he done this and why? Sherlock feels his blood boil, feels anger descend, and waves his arms about to get it away from him. He needs to know. He needs to understand. He needs to think.

Thinking is not what’s on schedule for him today however, he attempts to smoke a cigarette but ends up resting it half finished in the ash tray and throwing the rest out. He opens the windows to clear the air. He needs to think. He needs to think. He needs to think.

Where is John and does he know what’s going on?

An hour or so later Lestrade texts him back with the direction to check John’s blog. He does, with trepidation, to find it updated.

 _Reports of my death are false. I had no part in them and I’m sorry that you all suffered for it. I can’t get into specifics now but I’m safe, uninjured, and am back in London. Not home yet but hopefully soon._

John is in London.

John is uninjured.

John knew nothing about his being dead.

Sherlock is relieved, elated, and confused all at once. What has happened then, he wonders. _What has happened?_

The post comes the next morning with a parcel addressed to him in what is unmistakably the good doctor’s handwriting. When Sherlock eagerly rips it open, John’s Mycroft-issued mobile phone slides out and into his hand.

Sherlock knows what he’s expected to do but he’s afraid to do it.

The answers are all here, his mind tells him and, while Sherlock acknowledges that, it’s what the part of him that sounds like John says that gets him to actually do it.

 _It’s my story._

======================

The text messages tart out casual, just keeping in touch like Sherlock had told him to.

 _You withered away to nothing yet without me to force feed you?_

 _SM needs to stop moving into dead zones. If you’re sulking because you’re not hearing from me blame him!_

Obviously, from that one, John had never received any Sherlock’s texts.

Then things get serious. John has obviously heard about Moriarty’s death at this point.

 _I hear M is dead. You win the race then. You okay?_

A few hours gap then:

 _I’m okay by the way._

That strange text is explained later by the voice recorder. John had called Mycroft, against orders, to find out about Sherlock. He was told nothing, nothing about Sherlock and nothing about the fact that he had been dead for four months at this point. At some point he tells Mycroft to tell Sherlock that he, John, is okay. There, Sherlock mentally stabs at this data point, there (RIGHT THERE) John knew that something wasn’t right. He was getting better in the art of deduction but he was still too timid with his inferences. He’d had it, somewhere in his mind, he’d had it.

There is a break in texts of any kind until John sent the following to Mycroft: _SM dead. Home please?  
_

Mycroft’s response: _That would be best. Sherlock’s been an insufferable mess since you died._

Sherlock sees red at that. Sees red for the first time since allowing seven months of grief to rage through him, seven months of grief that he now knows he never needed to have experienced. How long had Mycroft planned to keep this up? Stupid question, he knew the answer to that well enough. Sherlock knew how his brother’s brain worked. He would have judged that Sherlock would not, for certain, kill Moriarty. In order to ensure that was how things would end there would have to be some incentive. Mycroft knows John’s hand, _everyone_ knows John’s hand, and treats him like the tool he had been in the military and gives him his orders while staging an elaborate sham with a captured, doubtlessly criminal, lookalike, in order to ensure his little brother’s compliance. He’d explain it all away later.

Sherlock understands it but, surprisingly, he doesn’t accept it. Maybe before he could have but not now, not now. Mycroft had not accounted for all the elements. John had showed his hand but no one seemed to really noticed how much of Sherlock’s own hand had been shown that night at the pool. John knew, no else really did.

Except Mycroft, he gave Mycroft that, but he hadn’t seen it all

The voice recordings are worse than text messages. John leaving messages that would never be received, a few case related ones that Sherlock dismisses, until he hears John’s cold voice informing Mycroft’s voicemail that if he doesn’t ring back with an explanation “to that text” he’d kill him next.

The ensuing two hour conversation, where John is told what Mycroft has done, is awful. John is hurt, angry, grieved, and a touch murderous. Sherlock knows that his first reaction is to fly back and go straight home but he doesn’t, he still hasn’t. He’s been in London for a week? Why the inaction?

The voice recorder goes on and Sherlock gets his answer.

John certainly had understood his hand. He’d commented on Sherlock’s reaction at the pool, where he’d thought that John had been Moriarty, but Sherlock hadn’t thought much of it after that. John obviously remembered. He knew that he was in danger of being tossed out forever if he just turned up. So he was breaking it slowly in a way that John knew Sherlock could understand. It’s brilliant, really.

 _“I’m not having him believe or even suspect that I did this willingly to him.”_ John’s voice informs Mycroft. Sherlock has to admit that he had suspected it for a moment but John doesn’t need to know that.

Sherlock had thought there was no one left to blame but himself. It turned out there was one more.

====================================================================

Sherlock is awake at dawn, literally the break of dawn. He has not done this in some time (being already awake due not ever having gone to bed does not count) but there is one last place to get the full story (he has half of it in the palm of his hand) and he wants to get there before it can get itself wrapped up in other things.

He sets up camp in Mycroft’s office and waits. When Mycroft enters and turns the lights on his start is visible. “Sherlock,” he greets. “What brings you here at this hour?”

Sherlock tosses John’s mobile on the desk and taps the screen. John and Mycroft’s voices play instantly.

 _“What did I tell you about ringing me?”_

 _“All that stuff you showed Sherlock, I want it. I want you to tell me what you’ve done and I want all that evidence.”_

 _“Why would I do that?”_

 _“Because you owe him the truth, and you owe me the proof that will convince him that I had no part in this.”_

 _“Just go home, Doctor.”_

 _“I am not going to give him a heart attack or have him toss me out for playing a trick on him that I was unaware I was partaking in. You used him. You manipulated him and used him to get a problem out of the way. You fucked him over, not me, and I am not getting the blame for this.”_

The corners of Mycroft’s mouth twitch. He plays it off as a suppressed smile but Sherlock knows annoyance on his brother when he sees it. He is frequently the cause of it after all. “I see he finally sent you his phone.”

It’s nonchalant, merely an observation with no interest or not in the emotional magnitude of what Sherlock now knows. The more frightening part of the whole thing is that Sherlock knows this is exactly what he’d be saying to anyone else sitting in his chair. That makes him angrier. He is not other people. He is Sherlock Holmes and John is John Watson and no one does this to them, especially not Mycroft bloody Holmes.

“Explanation.” It’s not a request.

“If John had been with you at the end would you have killed Moriarty?”

No. The answer is unequivocally no and Mycroft knows it. Sherlock doesn’t kill his criminals. He hands them over to whoever is appropriate and sometimes, rarely though, he lets them go. He would not have let Moriarty go, he’s not that far gone yet after all, but he wouldn’t have shot him in cold blood either. John would have stopped him if the idea had even crossed his mind.

Well, he thinks as he remembers that John had killed for him before (on their very first case after just meeting each other, no less), perhaps John might have let him do it. Too many variables. Capture, release or terminate. Too many to precisely pinpoint which he would have done.

Which is, Sherlock knows, what had troubled Mycroft enough to take this course of action; again, this is something that Sherlock understands, but also something that he cannot accept.

“He would have escaped,” Mycroft lectures. “He would have found his way out and then he would have done something else to you, John, or both of you. He wouldn’t hold back that time. He’d strike either of you down and then where would the survivor be?”

“Well now you know where I would be at least!” Sherlock snaps.

“Better you’ve had a trial run through it then, haven’t you? One day when John actually does get himself killed you’ll know what to expect.”

Sherlock thrusts himself violently from the chair and leans manically over the desk. “Don’t pass it off as a test, oh brother of mine,” he sneers. “You didn’t do this because you wanted to see how I’d react; you did this to get a job done faster. I’ve always warned you about short cuts.”

“Legwork is always so tiresome,” Mycroft agrees. “You almost made me work for it too, what with the refusing to accept perfectly fabricated evidence.”

“Not perfect. The doppelganger didn’t have the right scar.”

Mycroft tilts his head for a moment, nods at some distant thing, and promptly returns to the present. “If you want to scream at me Sherlock go right ahead. It’s not going to make me admit that anything I did was all that wrong. John didn’t think anything was off either.”

He did, Sherlock wants to yell. He did, he did, he DID, and he didn’t know. He never knew, never consented. The man simply isn’t capable of that level of deception, especially not to him and Sherlock knows it. So does Mycroft. “Why do you think I never told him until Moran was dead?” It’s a rhetorical question. If John had known he would have done something, more likely abandoned things and gone after Sherlock. Or else have sent a message somehow. Like he has been doing for the past week. Acting like nothing was off, that Sherlock had merely done his part and had been sent back to hold the fort (and not blow John’s cover), would leave John with little other course of action but to continue on. Continue on unless ordered otherwise, military training at its finest. Sherlock shakes his head.

“I did what I had to do,” Mycroft tells him. The ‘you would have done the same’ might as well have been spoken aloud for the tone of voice.

“Before,” Sherlock acknowledges. “Well before but not now.”

“You would have done it to anyone else.”

He wants to say John is not just anyone else but instead he demands to know where John is now. After Mycroft quotes him a hotel and room number Sherlock doesn’t even nod, instead he grabs John’s wallet and keys, which have been sitting on Mycroft’s desk like discarded paperweights.

“Not again,” he warns dangerously. “Not ever again, you understand. You let things take its course. You don’t get to use either of us like pawns again.”

Mycroft doesn’t react so Sherlock leaves.

When he reaches the hotel he finds John gone. So he heads back to Baker Street.

There he finds John. John, who’s alive and well and so very not dead but still seems like a hallucination. Sherlock had never hallucinated John’s presence, not once during the entire nightmare, but he doesn’t put it past himself to start now. He needs tactile evidence. He knows he can fool himself, knows that he at least has the capacity for it, but he’s never been able to fool his senses. Nothing ever has.

He reaches out and touches John, who doesn’t step back or flinch or anything despite how awkward and strange this must be to him (He doesn’t think he’s seen John hug anyone before, not even his sister). He feels his heart beat under his hand, very nearly in time with his own heart beat, which is pounding away in his ears. John asks him if he’s alive and it’s not a light question.

Sherlock nods his head and hugs him. John hugs back and, like that, he’s alive and real in mind and body.

They go for Chinese and it’s when John’s battle hardened eyes flutter closed in a sigh and open again to reveal the softer expression he’s had before this whole mess had started that Sherlock knows that it’s all, finally, over.

Just like that things go back to normal.

============================================================================================

John is purposely moving so he’s never out of Sherlock’s line of sight but it doesn’t stop Sherlock from thinking (half believing really) that John is going to vanish and he’s going to find himself alone surrounded in a cloud of smoke. John had noticed the slight odour on the couch when he’d sat on it but hadn’t mentioned anything. Something he was very good at, Sherlock remembered.

At some point in the evening John says that he has to go to bed. “I think I have two years of sleep to catch up on.” With a wave he climbs up the stairs and now, an hour later, Sherlock is still alone on the couch.

His legs are moving before what he’s doing actually comes to him. “Oh for pity’s sake,” he gripes as he finds himself in front of John’s bedroom and quietly opening the door to peek inside. John is still in the bed, still breathing, head turned away from the door. Sherlock sighs in relief but a shadow of doubt still lingers there. He grumbles. This is insane, he decides.

He has yet to take a step in either direction when John’s tired voice interrupts him. “Still alive and still here, Sherlock,” he reports with a grunt. “Now get some rest before I sedate you.”

Sherlock nods, knowing full well that John can’t see or hear him perform the gesture but doesn’t move. John suddenly pushes around so he’s facing Sherlock while still lying down. He takes one good look at him, scoots back to the far end of the bed and then throws the open the covers on the side of the bed closest to Sherlock.

“One night,” John tells him. “Just to make reality sink in a little bit better, and so I know if you’ve slept or not. Now climb in and be sure not to hog the covers or you’re sleeping on the floor.”

Sherlock, contrary to popular belief, knows an order when he hears one and takes his place in the offered space. He covers himself up, being careful not to tug the covers too far on his side. “Thank-you.” He says.

Instead of a ‘you’re welcome’ John says: “The next time I die please just avenge my death and leave it at that. I mean it’s all very flattering but if I have to greet you in any metaphorical afterlife because you’ve withered yourself to nothing on my account I will thrash you out of the afterlife so hard that it’ll bring colour back to your face.”

Sherlock has no choice but to chuckle at that. John turns his head and raises an eyebrow. “I knew you’d say that. “ He doesn’t acknowledge that the thought had indeed crossed his mind – it’s irrelevant now and John doesn’t need to actually hear it from his lips.

John nods and buries his face back in the pillow. “Good to know that you listen to me in some form,” he grunts.

“What happens if I go first?” Sherlock asks, curious.

“Then I promise to not off myself on pain of you thrashing me out of the metaphorical afterlife as well.” John’s tired and yawning now but Sherlock knows he’s serious. Besides Sherlock knows that John would never consider such a course, at least he was fairly sure. John is a little different now, so is he, and it will take most of tomorrow to sort out the changes.

At least he has the chance. He smiles victoriously at John’s sleeping back and rolls over into sleep.


End file.
